Homegrown Tomato Maddness; Clarence Thomas- Old White Man

So. Summer’s here and so are the big forest fires that burn and blacken our beautiful mountains. Just as the fire scorches the earth and consumes everything in sight, our US Supreme Court burns and blasphemes a hundred years of increasing civility with one sweeping act. Fires are blind and greedy; heartless and dumb. Fires are indiscriminate—fire consumes each and every thing without prejudice, without emotion, without thought.

Some of our Supreme Court Justices—the five assholes it took to strike down the most powerful tool we have to enforce nondiscrimination in our voting booths—have acted with extreme prejudice in turning a blind eye to the continued racial hatred and distrust that seems to have managed to refill the ranks of the new neo-conservative Republican and Libertarian Parties.

This Justice isn’t blind, it’s instead five old white men who have chosen to not see the truth. And don’t even start to tell me that Clarence “Marshmallow” Thomas isn’t an old white man. That brain-dead and gutless shithead is the worst of the five. Just as a former smoker is the worst of we anti-smokers, a former black man is the worst of all racists.

I can just hear the fuck head. “Why, nobody has ever discriminated against me. I kissed so much white ass that I actually turned white, like a chameleon. Those darkies need to get a grip.” Then that Long-dong Silver asshole would add, “What I meant to say is that all of me except my dick turned white. You know how the white women love black dick.”

How can Clarence Thomas deny that racism is alive and well in many, identifiable areas of the United States? How can five of those Justices live with themselves having made this decision?

Fuck the five of them!

Which reminds me. Did you know that dogs cannot tell a lie? They can fuck with you with evil intent and they can withhold pertinent facts, but they can’t lie. Don’t have whatever it is that allows you to lie. As the owner of two yakking dogs, I can attest to the this as fact. Many’s the time I’d take Dixie—my beloved Golden Retriever and first speeched puppy—out to help me troll for women, and many’s the time she’d say, “I’m not telling any unsuspecting woman’s dog that you’re a good catch, fuckhead. No way I’m lying for you.”

We’d watch cartoons together, and whenever a dog character was on the show Dixie would be a running narrative. “That is NOT what we say. I’d never say that, that Deputy Dog is a fake. That’s a human trying to talk like a dog”

And my sweet Dixie has a special place for Walt Disney characters. “And that Goofy. Someone needs to put that asshole to sleep.”

Dixie is old and has retired to live with my good buddy, Streaker Jones. Her replacement, the Squirt, came to me as Dixie’s protégées, and why, inthefuck, is a single follower and student a plural? Why isn’t Squirt a protege? Fucking French. I’m starting to think that most of the stupidity in the English language is all the French’s fault.

I do wish we’d inherited the way they flip their hands dismissively. I also like the way they say, “Oui-oui-oui-oui-oui…” softer and softer and really fast until they run out of breath. I’m always looking for apparently unoffensive ways to piss people off.

Anyway, I’m sitting on the portal with the dogs with a snoot full of beer and a head full of my favorite bud last night. I was looking at the little garden in the raised bed—the one I surrounded with rabbit wire to keep the dogs out of the tomato plants—and I noticed that the four heritage tomatoes that were days from picking were gone.

“Whuh?” I mumbled through the haze in my skull. “Where’s the tomatoes?”

Yoda sat up at my feet and looked at me like I needed a lobotomy, and the Squirt jumped from my lap and said to me, she said, “I’ve got to go take a crap,” and she trotted off across the little patch of grass and around to the side of the house where I couldn’t see her.

Like I said, I was, effectively, wasted, so it took me a minute to remember what it was that had me all consternated. I re-lit the doobie, dragged another thousand brain cells to the curb, and emptied the Carta Blanca bottle hanging in my hand between the index and middle fingers of my left hand. I’m a left-handed beer bottle holder when I’m smoking pot, and have you ever noticed how comfortable a long neck beer bottle is when fitted between index and middle fingers of a hand that dangles off the arm of a chair? The easy motion of bringing the bottle to your lips as you sit, slouched from brain fog, is something I need to remember to thank God for the next time They pay me a visit.

“Wait a fucking minute… Wait just a fucking minute!”

Now the goat dog looked like he was the one needing a lobotomization. He suddenly jumped up and ran around the house to join the Squirt. And don’t you grammar Nazis even start on me about my jumping tenses. I was, am, and always will be an ADHD-addled fuckbrain who did, does and will do multiple-track thinking, so you will, should and have to put up with the textural blending of my sequences.

If you can’t handle it, go the fuck on over to Glen Beck’s place and leave me alone.

Anyway, it finally dawned on me that the dogs had acted mightily funnily when I asked about my missing tomatoes, so I walked around and confronted the dogs. “I know how much you two like tomatoes. Did you two somehow find a way into the garden and eat my almost ripe tomatoes?”

They each looked away. “Well, did you? Answer me, Squirtie girl, are you the guilty party, little lady?”

“Na-na-na… Na-na-na-na…” Squirt stammered. She was sounding like a Frenchman with the Oui dealio except it was like she was trying to say “no-no-no”.

“Squir-rt?” I slowly queried, “you need to an-swer me.”

“God dammit, Mooner, you know I can’t tell a lie. Yes, we did it. We’re sorry, we didn’t mean to do it, but we love tomatoes,” she said with what was not a small trace of indignity.

“But why, little lady, you know you aren’t supposed to get in that garden area.”

“Humph,” she went, “we’re dogs, idiot, we can’t help ourselves.”

“But how’d you get in? I had rabbit fencing run both ways up and down. A snake would have trouble getting inside. There’s no way you could get in.”

Squirt stuck her chest out and said, “We’re smarter than you think.”

“Bullshit. I made that fencing dog proof. I’ve watched you for six weeks try to get inside of there. Somebody must have aided and abetted you. Did somebody fix you a way into my…”

Have I ever told you that my mother doesn’t really seem to like me. Did I tell you that she was here a week ago and how I was thinking that things have gotten better between us?

“Squirt, did Mother fix you a way to get into the tomato patch? Did she?”

She puffed her adorable little chest out even further. “We’re not squealers, asshole, we’ll never sing like canaries. Eat shit and die.”

Eat shit and die? When was the last time I said that wherein she picked it up to pitch back into my face?

It took a few minutes, but I found the place where someone had cut and bent the wire into a Squirt-sized opening and then pushed mulch over it. Seems the dogs uncovered and then recovered the opening as they came, and went. I repeated a conversation Mother and I had while she was here and I was showing her the back yard. “How are you going to keep the dogs out of your tomatoes, son?”

“Not a worry, Mother, I’ve dog-proofed it with two runs of rabbit wire. They’ll never get in.”

Once again I found myself forced to sing that Don Henley song. “Forgiveness, forgiveness, even if, even if, you don’t love me, anymore.”

I need to call my buddy BJ—talk to him about the great relationship he had with his momma. He just lost her and is going through those tough times, and I’m needing a support group.

I’ve been one of those scolds who’s been telling you to try to patch things up with your mom, but if she’s conspired with canines to steal your first tomatoes of the season, well… screw that! Some sins are unforgivable.

We’re still watching the first of our crop slowly grow from golf ball sized to cue ball size. A long time between now and when we’ll be slicin’ one of ‘em, I’m afraid. Last year’s salsa bottles tell me we had so many by the second week in July we were dicing them up for salsa… There’s no way we’ll be eating fresh tomatoes that soon, much less making salsa. I’m beginning to think the covered garden/no till method is not as productive, or at least it hasn’t been so far.

I tried to get together with Beej on Wednesday, but he was called away with kid duties or some such shit. Had a few thousand brain cells lined up as volunteers, too… you know, the ones that know how to multiply fractions and find the area of a trapezoid? Why do I want to keep THAT information handy, when I’ve got a computer to figure it all out a lot faster?

Explain doggicide to your animals, just so they can know they were warned before they sneak back into the tomatoes with evil intent.

Squat. In honor of Beej’s mother, I have been making a concerted effort to honor my own. Mother, that is. But as you said, some things are unforgivable. Wasted grey matter aside, conspiracy to defraud a man of his tomatoes should be a capitol offense.

As for doggicide, I can talk tough with them but until they were to physically harm another, I’m fodder and father both.